This following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
Content marketing is one of the most cost-effective forms of “advertising” available to startups. Through story telling, businesses can turn visitors into a fans, fans into a buyers, and buyers into life-long customers / brand advocates. And for many, video is the preferred medium through which to deliver this story.
Because hosting videos is an unnecessary drain to your server, standard practice is to host your videos on a third party platform. But which platform should your startup use? We reached out to our friends at YEC to share a few of their favorites. They’re below. Enjoy.
The Top 8 Video Hosting Platforms for Startups
1. Amazon S3
With the Amazon S3, you can still maintain a very professional look and have your videos hosted by a third party to save on bandwidth. You can also get services such as EasyVideoSuite that allow for simple integration with S3 and analytics on views of your videos, time spent and more. The main reason for S3 is its professional look and feel for what you can do.
– Dave Nevogt, co-founder at Hubstaff.com
2. Wistia
Without a doubt, Wistia is the best solution for hosting videos. Its player is easily customizable and also helps considerably with conversion.
– Patrick Vlaskovits, Author at The Lean Entrepreneur
3. JWPlayer
Our company loves the flexibility JWPlayer gives us. It’s an affordable solution and you can host your videos with them, or with another service such as Amazon S3. The player is mobile friendly and works well on any type of website. The customer support is phenomenal as well.
– Jennifer Donogh, President at Ovaleye, LLC
4. Vimeo
The benefits of Vimeo are a lot like YouTube, but the brand is a bit more professional and artsy.
– Brennan White, CEO at Watchtower
5. Kaltura
Kaltura is a great option that features transcoding, syndication and top-tier hosting.
– Andrew Schrage, Co-Owner at Money Crashers Personal Finance
6. YouTube
Besides being low-cost, YouTube’s built-in search and sharing tools make it better than anything else available. You want your company’s content to be easy to find and easily shareable.
– Sarah Schupp, CEO & Founder at UniversityParent
7. Vidyard
Vidyard is by far the best option. Not only does it allow you to host videos, but also it provides great tracking on its dashboard that can help you understand which videos are effective and what people enjoy watching. But the real key is its ability to integrate with services including Salesforce and Hubspot. You can take video from being something cool on your site to a tool that can track who watches it and view that right in Salesforce or Hubspot, along with all the data about that lead. It is a total game changer.
– Andrew Angus, Founder and CEO at Switch Video
8. CloudFront
Amazon offers CloudFront, a content distribution network that is very affordable and ensures your videos play anywhere in the world without issues. With CloudFront, Amazon locally caches your videos in nodes around the world so the video doesn’t need to stream from the U.S. for someone watching in India. The video will actually stream from a node in India. We save hundreds to thousands every month by using CloudFront instead of more typical SaaS video hosting providers.
– Bhavin Parikh, CEO at Magoosh Inc